At first it was thought that this increased morbidity occurred because of the practical consequences of being isolated: the lack of care, the potentially diminished ability to feed and nurture oneself. In fact, it seems almost certain now that it is the subjective experience of loneliness that produces the physical consequences, not the simple fact of being alone. It is the feeling itself that is stressful; the feeling that sets the whole grim cascade into motion.
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Hopper could not possibly have known about any of this, except of course from the inside out, and yet in painting after painting he shows not just what loneliness looks like but also how it feels, communicating with his blank walls and open windows a simulacrum of its paranoid architecture, the way it functions to simultaneously entrap and expose.
It’s naive to assume that an artist is personally acquainted with their subject matter, that they are not simply a witness to their age, to the prevailing moods and preoccupations of the times. All the same, the more I looked at Nighthawks, the more I wondered about Hopper himself, who had after all once said: ‘The man’s the work. Something doesn’t come out of nothing.’ The vantage point the painting makes you enter into is so particular, so estranging. Where did it come from? What was Hopper’s own experience of cities, of intimacy, of longing? Was he lonely? Who do you have to be to see the world like that?
Though he disliked interviews, and as such left only a minimal record of his life in words, Hopper was often photographed, and so it’s possible to track him through the years, from gawky youth in a straw boater in the 1920s to great man of the arts in the 1950s. What comes across in these mostly black and white images is a quality of intense self-containment, of someone set deep inside himself, leery of contact, emphatically reserved. He stands or sits always a little awkwardly, slightly hunched, as tall men often are, his long limbs uncomfortably arranged, dressed in dark suits and ties or three-piece tweeds, his long face sometimes sullen, sometimes guarded and sometimes showing a small glint of amusement, the deprecating wit that came and went in disarming flashes. A private man, one might conclude, not on easy terms with the world.
All photographs are silent, but some are more silent than others, and these portraits attest to what was by all accounts Hopper’s most striking feature, his gigantic resistance to speech. It’s a different thing from quietness, silence; more powerful, more aggressive. In his interviews, it functions as a barrier, preventing the interviewer from opening him up or putting words into his mouth. When he does speak, it’s often simply to deflect the question. ‘I don’t remember,’ he says frequently, or ‘I don’t know why I did that.’ He regularly uses the word unconscious, as a way of evading or disclaiming whatever meaning the interviewer believes to be seeping from his pictures.
Just before his death in 1967, he gave an unusually long interview to the Brooklyn Museum. He was eighty-four at the time: the foremost realist painter at work in America. As always, his wife was present in the room. Jo was a consummate interrupter, filling in the spaces, jumping in all the gaps. The conversation (which was recorded and transcribed, though never published in full) is illuminating not only in terms of content, but also for what it reveals of the Hoppers’ complex dynamic, their intimately adversarial marriage.
The interviewer asks Edward how he comes to choose his subjects. As usual, he seems to find the question painful. He says that the process is complicated, very difficult to explain, but that he has to be very much interested in his subject, and that as such he can only produce perhaps one or two paintings a year. At this, his wife interrupts. ‘I’m being very biographic,’ she says, ‘but when he was twelve years old, he grew, he was six feet tall.’ ‘Not at twelve. Not at twelve,’ Hopper says. ‘But that’s what your mother said. And you said. Now you’re changing it. Oh, you contradict me . . . You know, you’d think we were bitter enemies.’ The interviewer makes some small sound of disavowal and Jo ploughs on, describing her husband as a schoolboy, slim as a blade of grass, no strength in him at all, not wanting to make trouble with the mean kids, the bullies.
But that made him rather, it would make one shy . . . he had to lead the line at school, you know, the tallest, and oh, he hated that, these bad boys in back of him, and they’d try to push him off in the wrong direction.
‘Shy is hereditary,’ Hopper says, and she replies: ‘Well, I think it’s circumstantial too, you know . . . He never has been much on the declaring himself – ’. At that he interrupts, saying: ‘I declare myself in my paintings.’ And again, a little later: ‘I don’t think I ever tried to paint the American scene. I’m trying to paint myself’.
He’d always had a knack for drawing, right from his boyhood in Nyack, New York at the tail end of the nineteenth century, the only son of cultured and not particularly well-suited parents. A lovely naturalness of line, and at the same time a certain sourness that came out especially in the ugly caricatures he drew right through his life. In these often strikingly unpleasant drawings, which were never exhibited but which can be seen in Gail Levin’s biography, Hopper presents himself as a skeletal figure, all long bones and a grimace, often under the thumb of women or hankering silently for something they refuse to supply.
At eighteen, he went to art school in New York, where he was taught by Robert Henri, one of the foremost proponents of the gritty urban realism known as the Ashcan School. Hopper was an outstanding and much-praised student, and so understandably lingered at college for years, unwilling to cast himself fully into independent adulthood. In 1906 his parents financed a trip to Paris, where he shut himself away, not meeting any of the artists in the city at the time, a lack of interest in prevailing currents or fashions that he maintained lifelong. ‘I’d heard of Gertrude Stein,’ he remembered later, ‘but I don’t recall having heard of Picasso at all.’ Instead, he spent his days wandering the streets, painting by the river or sketching prostitutes and passers-by, setting down a taxonomy of hairdos and women’s legs and nifty feathered hats.
It was in Paris that he learned to open up his paintings, to let light in, following the example of the Impressionists, after the gloomy browns and blacks favoured in his New York training. Learned too to meddle with perspective, to make small impossibilities in his scenes: a bridge reaching where it couldn’t, the sun falling from two directions at once. People stretched, buildings shrunk, infinitesimal disturbances in the fabric of reality. This is how you unsettle the viewer, by making a not-rightness, by rendering it in little jabs of white and grey and dirty yellow.
For a few years he went back and forth to Europe, but in 1910 he settled permanently in Manhattan. ‘It seemed awfully crude and raw here when I got back,’ he remembered decades later. ‘It took me ten years to get over Europe.’ He was jarred by New York, its frenetic pace, the relentless pursuit of the long green. In fact, money quickly became a major problem. For a long time, no one was interested in his paintings at all, and he scraped by as an illustrator, hating the clichéd commissions, the dismal necessity of lugging a portfolio all over town, an unwilling salesman for work he didn’t think at all worthwhile.
They weren’t exactly rich in relationships either, those first American years. No girlfriend, though there might have been brief liaisons here and there. No intimate friendships, and only occasional contact with his family. Colleagues and acquaintances, yes, but a life notably short on love, though long on independence, long too on that discarded virtue, privacy.
This sense of separation, of being alone in a big city, soon began to surface in his art. By the early 1920s, he was making a name for himself as an authentically American artist, stubbornly sticking with realism despite the fashionable tide of abstraction filtering in from Europe. He was determined to articulate the day-to-day experience of inhabiting the modern, electric city of New York. Working first with